That's exactly what I thought in the first place. Since when were OCZ's products good?Get "top-notch" performance by trading reliability? That's stupidity, not good engineering.I wish they disappear because they really deserve to go to hell. I know nobody forces us to buy their hardware and that one less player means less competition so it would be worse for the customer, but there were just too many issues with their products. I always advised AGAINST buying their products and I'm glad I did that. (from PSUs to SSD and whatever else - their policies were too dumb).Reply

Yeah it's very disappointing to see OCZ drives recommended with their known reliability issues. This isn't like harddrives where everyone has their anecdotal experiences, you can look at real return rate statistics and see how bad it is, and draw reasonable inferences as to why.Reply

From an earlier 840 review (not Pro nor EVO): "We will see about final pricing in a couple of weeks, but for now the 840 looks like the entry level SSD to buy. The 840 Pro is likely the drive to buy for your primary notebook/workstation, while the 840 is the drive to recommend for a relative who isn't as concerned with performance and has a much lighter workload."

The 840 Pro is still a good drive but better drives have come out since it was released. The biggest "problem" in the 840 Pro is its IO consistency, which isn't as good when compared with other high-end drives. For a heavy user that is an aspect you should pay attention to because you will likely be operating at steady-state or close to it. Reply

Very fast Sandforce drive for $140 in 240GB capacity. 500MB/s+ performance with 2 MILLION hours MTBF rating. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...Best bang/buck, right there. Unless you need SLC (TEENY TINY % of market) this is really the only drive anyone should be looking at in SATA.

OCZ drives should really never have been on the list in the first place due to their well-known reliability problems, but now that OCZ has declared itself bankrupt, it's additionally imperative that these entries should be removed immediately.Reply

The question of the day, of course, is 1 "enthusist" 240GB SSD, or 2 lesser priced 120GB SSDs in RAID 0. Cheaper drives in RAID 0 have always seemed to make the most sense to me from a performance and cost stand point (I grabbed 3x 60GB vertex 1s instead of 1 larger drive for the same price), but maybe things have changed with the cost drop in NAND?Reply

That was the question of the day on a sunny spring day back in 2010. Maybe 2011.

Today, the potential improvement in peak sequential speed is somewhat inconsequential for most tasks. On the other hand, when it comes to fast response times, you loose speed because you introduced organization overhead. Keep in mind that most 240GB SSDs will already come with twice the NAND chips compared to the 120GB SSD, so you havn't double anything on the physical side by combining two 120GB drives.

Also, the 240GB version of most "enthusiast" drives is close to 200$ anyways, and the reasonable cheap 120GB drives are not far below 100$ either. So there really isn't much saving potential anymore.Reply

Whatever happened to Intel drives that they don't make it to recommendations today?

My context: I do software development and data processing (read: heavy load on my drive). I've been using SSDs in my workhorse machines for 5 years now. I've sticked to pre-SandForce Intel drives primarily due to their reliability. I never had an issue.Reply

I don't find Intel's consumer offerings to be very competitive at the moment. The SF-2281 is really starting to show its age and it can't compete in performance with the other high-end SSDs. Intel also tends to price themselves out of the game, although 240GB SSD 520 at $180 is a fairly good deal. I've got absolutely nothing against Intel but I think there are better drives in the market at the moment.Reply

If you're concerned about failure, you probably should be running a mirror at minimum. If you're going to that length, then I'd bet RAID 10 of 4x 120GB Samsung Evos would be faster than a mirror of 240GB SanDisk Extreme IIIs.Reply

I'd take that bet, I think. Sure twice the number of EVOs should be able to achieve a higher sequential speed, but the SanDisk absolutely kills the EVO when it comes to random writes, by more than a factor 2. I think in every reasonably well designed real-world benchmark the waiting periods on the EVOs would just be too long for them to keep up with the SanDisks.Reply

What makes EVO a great SSD is that "SLC" cache they have (same NAND, but used with 1 bit per cell instead of 3) and the RAPID (yeah, that's the name) RAM cache you can enable. So for a Windows boot drive in AHCI I can recommend it wholeheartedly, just not for RAID setups or other OSes. You also need a fairly decent cpu (at least a SB core i3/i5) and 8 GB of RAM (it takes 1 GB out of 8) to max out the performance of RAPID. If you also can spare like 10% for overprovisioning (Samsung's utility is very nice and friendly), you may feel you have the fastest drive on the planet... :-)Reply

Neither of the SSD's in the enthusiast recommendation actually show consistent performance in your reviews. Maybe I'm missing something, but (for example) the Corsair Neutron "shows" as a much more consistent drive both with and without over provisioning (I'm basing this on the graphs that you post in the reviews). Heck, my Samsung 840 pro with over provisioning seems like a much better choice. Can you explain why these drives were picked for their consistency when your own data seems to be contradictory?Reply

The SanDisk drive has kind of weird IO consistency as it drops first and then gets better again. After the drop, the IO consistency is amazing for a while, although it does drop again. If you look at our Storage Bench 2013, that's where the Extreme II shines, which is partly thanks to its IO consistency. The Storage Bench results should be more applicable to real life because it consists of both reads and writes as well as multiple IO sizes and queue depths (whereas IO consistency is just 4KB random writes at QD32, i.e. easier to optimize for that). The same applies for the Seagate 600 but I mainly added it for the great deals (240GB for $130).

There's absolutely nothing wrong with Samsung 840 Pro or Corsair Neutron, they're both great drives. However, I didn't want to add too many drives because it kind of defeats the purpose of an article like this if you still have to make a decision between five drives. Reply

If I could get any SSD drive, I would of course go with Samsung 840 Pro, but it's so dang expensive. I think a good review would have been showing if paying $200 more for the 512gb Pro version from the 500gb Evo version is worth it. I'm went ahead and got the EVO version because I doubt the performance increase will be worth $200(thought I might be wrong)Reply

So, using the Anandtech bench link, and comparing the 840 pro 256 gb to the Sandisk Extreme 2 240gb it looks like a tie. The Sandisk does beat the pro in some areas, however, not substantially, and yet it uses substantially more power.

Then when comparing it to the Seagate 600, the Samsung appears to be ahead in virtually all areas. Still uses less idle power, and overall power, however the Seagate comes much closer to the Samsung in power draw, compared to the Sandisk.

You meantion IO consistency, which is fair.

However, I thought that in general, the performance of an SSD increased with the capacity. It seems I remember reading that. If I am wrong please correct me.

If the above is true, though, you are comparing a 256gb pro to the 480gb Sandisk, and Seagate.

Also, the Review, of the Samsung was done back in September 2012, vs, May and June of 2013, for the Sandisk, and the Seagate. Samsung released a firmware June 2013.

I have no way of knowing wether it improved any io performance consistency of not, short of you guys reviewing it. I would like to know if it does improve, as I have an 840 pro 128gb, and I have been thinking of upgrading to a 256, or larger version.

Great article! Just purchased the Seagate 600 series 240GB for $140 recently, compared to my other option of the Samsung 840 pro 256GB which was $200+. Can't even compare in terms of value really.Reply

It amuses me that anyone ever recommended OCZ drives, given the givens. They were always bad. Even your own commentary on the state of OCZ being bought by Toshiba had you acknowledging they skipped QA processes that should have been done...

...so that begs the question, why the hell did you ever recommend them in the first place?Reply

Please add one more section - laptop enthusiast (and to be extra sweet - laptop mainstream). IIRC reviews show battery sap but the metric does not significantly impact recommendation. Makes perfect sense for a bigger rig but what would you recommend to mobile users?Reply

Picked up a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB for $140 over Black Friday weekend. Very pleased.I suspect that SSDs and HDDs will both get cheaper in 2014, which is good news.

Someone above me mentioned adding a section for laptop friendly SSDs, but I think the prohibitive features there are cost and also physical space. Since your laptop can only support one internal 2.5 drive, your SSD has to be large enough to handle all storage by itself (instead of sharing that responsibility with a high capacity HDD as would be the case in a desktop). That means dropping somewhere between $300 and $400 on a ~500gb SSD. I'm not sure my laptop is still worth that much money by itself. Why pay for a repair that costs more than the value of the car, right?

Now if more companies get on board with this dual drive business that WD is doing with it's new Black2 drive, and then the obligatory waiting period for new tech premiums wears off, we may be in business. If I can buy a $175 120GB SSD and 500GB HDD 2.5 dual drive - and in so doing make my laptop stay relevant for another year to two years, I'm in. Please WD, take my money. But by that time (or shortly thereafter), we may see laptops being sold stock with such drives.

And all of that assumes that laptops continue to find a place in the market. Tablet popularity is growing at an astounding rate. For my own right, I don't intend to ever own another laptop. I don't need one professionally and I don't anticipate going back to college, so a tablet is ideal. You could argue that my kids will need one when they start college, but by the time that happens, tablets will include all the productivity elements associated with laptops and my kids will be more comfortable typing on a virtual keyboard than a tactile one (like I'm accustomed to a computer keyboard while my parent's feel at home at a typewriter). Progress, son. You can't stop it. It's all you can do just to keep up.Reply